Welcome

This site encompasses a wide range of interests - from photography to multi-day river trips. What ties it all together is the outdoors. Throughout the years I've had a lot of fantastic experiences in the backcountry, and I want to share that stoke & knowledge through photography and useful articles. Enjoy!

In January 2016 I released an online survey with the intent of determining whether shoulder injury rates differed among whitewater kayakers who used bent shaft or straight shaft paddles. Shoulder injuries are incredibly prevalent with whitewater paddlers, and I was personally interested in the data since I sustained multiple subluxations while kayaking ultimately resulting in surgery in 2012.

Many kayakers must have had a similar level of interest in the survey since there were over 2,700 responses. I fully expected less than 100 responses, but the survey truly went viral. Thanks for providing that data and rallying to spread the survey around! Unfortunately there are many confounding factors present, and I never had the time or technical skill to do justice to the sheer amount of data collected in the survey. I'd like to say I could put aside time for a project like this, but I'll be starting medical school next week and I don't think it's going to happen. Thus I'm making the raw data public so that people can sift through it if they're interested.

I first arrived in Southern Oregon as a raft guide back in the summer of 2016, and I kept hearing about this river called the Illinois. It seemed that everyone agreed that it was their favorite multi-day river trip in the area, but I was never in the area early enough to catch the spring flows. This year I had a chance to spend three days on the Illinois from Miami Bar to Oak Flat, and I finally understand why this section of river is so special.

Here is a collection of trip reports with photos on information on a variety of destinations. This list is a work in progress, so I'll add content as I visit more destinations. Trips are separated by activity type.

With a few days off of work in Southern Oregon in early June I began to look into boating options. I had heard great things about the Cal Salmon river, and with it only being 3 hours from the Grants Pass area it was the obvious choice. I headed down to the Nordheimer campground on a Friday night and hoped that I would run into some boaters there for the weekend.

Having a pair of quality, well-fitting ski boots is critical to transferring leg and foot movements to the skis. Finding the right fitting boot is a long process though, and achieving that custom fit through repeated trips to a boot fitter can become time intensive and expensive. This winter I started to research and try on a variety of ski boots, but no brand fit perfectly out of the box. The fit was often good in a few areas then uncomfortable either in the toe box or around the ankle. Through my research I came across Salomon’s Custom Shell technology which intrigued me since it gave one the ability to not only thermoform the liner but also the plastic shell of the boot. This would allow me to buy ski boots at a discount online and custom fit them at home. This guide gives the instructions on how to custom fit the shell at home using just an oven and tub of water.

I finished bikepacking the Colorado Trail in the fall of 2016, and quickly became interested in the average trip length of other trail users. I originally intended to analyze bikepacker trip length, but I created an online survey and 90% of the responses came from thru-hikers (57 out of 63 responses). This article examines the average length of a thru hike on the Colorado Trail as well as other factors including hiker age, gender differences, and whether hikers wished they had budgeted extra days for their trip.

Packing for an extended bikepacking trip isn’t drastically different from that of a hiking trip, but there are a few critical pieces of gear that can make a world of difference. I outline those pieces of gear here along with a comprehensive bikepacking trip gear list. This article came about after completing the Colorado Trail this fall, and is part of a little web series about my trip along with advice aimed to help other mountain bikers (and possibly even hikers) plan their own adventures on the trail.

This article is part of a series about bikepacking the Colorado Trail. If you haven't already I'd highly suggest reading the introductory post which briefly describes the Colorado Trail as well as details my experience. These photos follow a chronological progression of my bikepacking trip on the Colorado from Denver to Durango starting on September 16th, 2016. Enjoy!

This is the second article in a series about bikepacking the Colorado Trail, and it covers basic planning and logistical aspects of the trip. If you haven’t already you should read the introductory article which gives a brief overview of the trail as well as my experience bikepacking the trail in the fall of 2016. This guide is geared towards bikepackers, but much of the information could also be beneficial to backpackers.

This is an introductory article, the first in a series about bikepacking the Colorado Trail. When I started researching the Colorado Trail I had a lot of questions and I hope this guide can both help to point you in the right direction and get you stoked as you start planning!

May gave me a little bit of time off from work due to low flows on the Owyhee River as well as rehab time for my dislocated shoulder on the Illinois River earlier in the month. I decided to take this extra time and venture down south for a sightseeing/photography tour of Northern California. Previously I ventured around the Trinity Alps area to paddle on the Cal Salmon and hike the Four Lakes Loop, but that was the extent of my California knowledge.

Once a little-known island situated between Greenland and Europe, Iceland has rapidly become a popular travel destination. In 2000 around 300,000 people visited in Iceland. That more than tripled to nearly 1 million visitors in 2014, and in 2016 almost 1.8 million people visited the island with a population of only 334,000. It’s hard to pinpoint where this sudden surge of interest came from, but some experts point to the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, which affected air travel across Europe in 2010 and may have put Iceland on people’s travel radar.

So tourism is booming in Iceland. Should you visit? Having visited Iceland in October 2017, I can say that the hype is real. The land of fire and ice is a unique travel destination with landscapes that can only be described as otherworldly. So yes, you should visit. I’d say do it sooner than later since tourism continues to skyrocket, and this will inevitably take a toll on the wild landscapes that draw people to Iceland.

It’s that time of year when the holiday shopping rush begins. I do my best to stay out of the consumerist mayhem, but do want to highlight a few items that I’ve really enjoyed using this past year. These products range from electronics to camping gear. Who knows, maybe you’ll even find a good holiday gift idea in here!

I recently read Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and a message that stuck with me is having gratitude and feeling joy when using something you love. These are a few of those items that give me that feeling. So many products claim to make life easier or enhance it in some way, but few actually accomplish this claim. These items truly work well and are positive additions to my life.

A few years ago I sustained a significant concussion while mountain biking, then just a week later had surgery for a pre-existing labral tear in my shoulder. A couple weeks after I was back in college, and felt just a bit different. I never had insomnia previously, but suddenly I found myself anxious and confused as I struggled to fall asleep each night. I would get in bed and keep checking the clock each hour as I tried to calm my mind, but before I knew it five hours would pass and I’d still be awake. Sleep was even harder then as I would start to fret about the next day. Thus began a vicious cycle, and I soon broke down and asked for a prescription of Ambien (zolpidem) sleeping pills.

As I got up to leave the examination room, the doctor's assistant mentioned that if I wanted to facilitate the healing process I could consider taking a calcium supplement or multi-vitamin. Historically the research has been inconclusive on whether vitamin supplementation is effective or possibly even harmful, so I decided to look into this statement a bit further.

The new MCAT (2015 MCAT) is by far the most intensive and expansive test of the undergraduate career. The good news is that a few months of focused, intense study will give you the basic tools to handle even the most complicated looking questions. I just recently finished the MCAT journey in May 2016, and wanted to write this as an informal guide to help future test takers.